Many languages, especially languages with very simple phonology, such as Piraha͂, have a whistled form. Why not toki pona?Only 5 tonemes are needed to represent each of toki pona's words using words of up to 3 tonemes in length. I propose the following tonemes:

An interesting code, but not something that grows -- as whistling codes in natural languages do -- from the base language itself. tp doesn't have tones, only stress and less stress, so that can't be a source for a whistle. All two-syllable words have the same stress pattern and so on. It might be that there is some pona qualities to the various sounds that make up a word (a noun spectrogram shows there is, but not one that coverts naturally to tones). And, of course, the tune to which each sentence is said might contribute something. But, for the moment, this is just another arbitrary code, even less related to the language than, say, the emoticon code. (btw citing Piraha~ data is almost a sure way to get everybody suspicious about whatever you say.)

Last edited by janKipo on Fri Oct 13, 2017 11:26 am, edited 1 time in total.

Silbo is basically a way of whistling spanish, not technically a language. It could be used to "pronounce" in any other language, but as spanish has simpler phonemes, it is specially intelligible when whistling.

Good news are, toki pona has phonetics very similar to spanish.

Silbo is a bit hard to learn and understand at first, but it follows some simple rules:

-For vowels, whistle with the same mouth opening you would say them. This makes i the highest pitched, then e, a, and o/u are the lowest.-For consonants, you just whistle the ones that don't require you to close your lips. Mainly: ---K (sounds like a short stop) ---Y (our toki pona J, sounds like a short i)---G (sounds like a short dip in volume)---S (sounds like a sharp, airy fluctuation).-Any other consonant is replaced: ---K replaces p, f---Y replaces d, n, l, r---G replaces m, n, j, b---S replaces t, ch

So basically it is a "rewrite" of the language with 4 vowels and 4 consonants.

Thanks for that brief and informative description.tp, even though it has very few words in a large word space, has a large number of very similar words, made even more so by this reduction in the number of consonants (the vowels are less a problem, since tp is almost a three-vowel system anyhow). So, this is not going to be a very practical code for tp.